Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) are getting increasingly popular with Russian investors, apparently displacing traditional investment products, according to a new survey. Russia’s Association of Forex Dealers (AFD), a local self-regulatory organization focused on the foreign exchange market, polled 502 Russian investors to find out the local investor sentiment regarding cryptocurrencies. Released on Tuesday, the survey was conducted from Aug. 4 to Aug. 24, 2021. In the survey, nearly 77% of respondents said that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ether (ETH) and Litecoin (LTC) are the “most forward-looking” investment. Only 8.8% of respondents indicated that they view gold as the best investment, …
A major cryptocurrency and blockchain association in Russia is launching a project to bring global crypto mining operations to the country amid a Chinese crypto mining crackdown. The Russian Association of Cryptoeconomics, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, or RACIB, announced an initiative aimed at transferring global computing resources for crypto mining to the Russian Federation. More information on the project is expected to be released at a later date, a spokesperson for RACIB told Cointelegraph. In order to promote and implement the project, RACIB is closely cooperating with Russian government authorities and state corporations, forming a range of joint working groups …
Russia’s Ministry of Finance is continuing to push regulations for the cryptocurrency industry by proposing new tax requirements. The ministry now reportedly wants to introduce criminal liability for failure to declare taxes on crypto, including prison terms of up to three years. According to a Sept. 24 report by Kommersant, the ministry proposes that individuals who fail to report an amount of over 1 million Russian rubles ($13,000) in annual crypto operations should serve a three-year prison term or hard labor. The ministry also proposed major fines for smaller unreported amounts. As such, any physical or legal entity in Russia …
An employee at a nuclear research center in the closed town of Sarov in Russia was fined for illegally mining Bitcoin (BTC). Convicted to pay $7,000 fine According to a Sept. 27 article by Russian news outlet Meduza, a man was fined 450,000 rubles ($7,000) for trying to mine Bitcoin by using a petaflop-capable supercomputer at his workplace, the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute in Sarov, Russia. Sarov, about 230 miles east of Moscow is a closed town as it is the Russian center for nuclear weapons research. The court delivered the verdict on Sept. 17. The nuclear research employee was …
Gone are the days when shady dealings in crypto were perceived as immune to the clutches of law enforcement. Illicit crypto proceeds can be shuttled between wallet addresses at the click of a mouse, and their obfuscation behind the multiple strings of numbers and letters of wallet addresses can create a dizzying — if not impenetrable — cryptographic maze for authorities to navigate. But the criminals themselves present a more concrete target, and as they interface with everything from crafty code to unwieldy hardware to ‘traditional’ firearms, there has been some success in 2018 in nabbing some of the year’s …